In this post, I share an infographic explaining the Cross-Site Restore feature in VantageCloud Enterprise. This feature allows you to quickly create a Disaster Recovery site for your Production database or launch a test environment based on an existing one.

What VantageCloud Enterprise is

Teradata offers solutions to keep your data warehouse or data lakehouse in the three leading Service Cloud Providers: AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The umbrella term for this offering is VantageCloud.

VantageCloud Enterprise is the solution to host large data warehouses in the Cloud. It is meant to optimise performance, and it uses the traditional Teradata architecture.

VantageCloud Lake is the new Teradata cloud-native database. It is ideal for both data lakehouses and data warehouses. Furthermore, Lake is built to optimise cost storage while speeding up the response to your critical queries.

Enterprise and Lake offer the complete set of Teradata analytic functions for Machine Learning, Data Science, and traditional reporting in a bundle called ClearScape Analytics.

Do I need a Data Protection Plan in the Cloud?

Running your workloads in the Cloud doesn’t imply that they are magically protected against natural disasters, human errors or malicious attacks. You still need to define and configure a plan to protect your data and operations.

For example, on January 11th 2023, all domestic flights in the U.S. were grounded after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) online Notices to Air Missions (NOTAM) safety briefing system crashed. The cause was that contract personnel unintentionally deleted files while working to correct synchronisation between the live primary database and a backup one.

Moreover, in July 2022, the heatwave in London took down Oracle’s and Google’s cloud data centres. As a consequence, operations from many companies were disrupted with various effects.

So, you need to plan and implement policies to protect your data and operations.

Cross-Site Restores

As part of the VantageCloud solutions, Teradata offers a feature to quickly build a Disaster Recovery site for your Enterprise database. It also lets you create a test site based on your Production database. This feature is the Cross-Site Restores, a generic term for BaaS (Backup as a Service). It essentially allows replicating an Enterprise database in the Cloud with either snapshots or DSA backups.

You can configure, manage, monitor and review the errors in case a snapshot or DSA backup fails via the Vantage Console. For example, some of the tasks you can perform are:

• Create and Manage DSA Backup Policies,
• Create and Schedule Snapshots for Backup,
• Request a scheduled Backup restore,
• Response time to request per Service Level SLA,
• Abort and Retry backups (ad hoc),
• View the status of current backups and backup history, plus error codes,
• View Backup job size and storage consumption trends,
• Use external APIs for triggering backups, etc.

Cross-Region Restores

I called Cross-Site Restore to the Backup-as-a-Service feature I discussed in this post. However, the feature allows to perform:

• Cross-Site Restores per se, i.e. take DSA Backups and Snapshots from a site, and restore them in:
  • The same site, o
  • A different one within the same region as the source system, either in the same availability zone or another one.
• Cross-Region Restores, where you restore the DSA Backups or Snapshots in a Vantage site on a region different from the source system.

To Know More

Check the Data Protection chapter in the Enterprise online documentation to learn how to use the Cross-Site Restore from the console. There you can learn how to create backups or snapshots, how to restore snapshots or backups, how to protect the snapshots and the backups so nobody can accidentally delete them and how you can use Cross-Site Restore for Disaster Recovery.

Note that if you want to use Customer-Managed Keys in your VantageCloud Enterprise instance, Teradata supports them for Cross-Site and Cross-Region Restores with Snapshots. However, if you use Cross-Site and Cross-Region Restores with DSA backups, Teradata only supports them in Azure and GCP. You have more details in the post Teradata Enterprise: Ins and Outs of the Encryption Keys, along with other security considerations to perform BaaS operations.

I updated this post on 18 December 2023 to add a link to Teradata Enterprise: Ins and Outs of the Encryption Keys.

I edited this post on 28 December 2023 to include the section Cross-Region-Restores.